Hasta La Gadget!

By Anton Zverev and Matt Spetalnick

HRABOVE, Ukraine/WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid out what he called overwhelming evidence of Russian complicity in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 as international horror deepened over the fate of the victims’ remains.

Kerry demanded that Moscow take responsibility for actions of pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine whom Washington suspects of downing the jet with a missile, and expressed disgust at their “grotesque” mishandling of the bodies.

Television images of the rebel-held crash sites, where the remains of victims had lain decomposing in fields among their personal belongings, have turned initial shock and sorrow after Thursday’s disaster into anger.

Emotions ran high in the Netherlands, the home country of about two-thirds of the 298 people who died in the Boeing 777. The Dutch foreign minister has said the nation is “furious” to hear bodies were being “dragged around”, while relatives and church leaders demanded they be rapidly returned home.

But the departure of dozens of corpses loaded into refrigerated railway wagons was delayed on Sunday as Ukrainian officials and rebels traded blame over why the train had not yet left the war zone, and where or when international investigators would be able to check it.

The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to vote on Monday on a resolution that would condemn the downing of the plane and demands that those responsible be held accountable and that armed groups not compromise the integrity of the crash site.

In an apparent bid to compromise with Moscow, the wording of the resolution, drafted by Australia, was changed to characterize the incident as the “downing” of the flight, instead of “shooting down,” according to the final draft obtained by Reuters. Diplomats said it was unclear if Russia would support the final version.

In Washington, Kerry criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and threatened “additional steps” against Moscow.

“Drunken separatists have been piling bodies into trucks and removing them from the site,” he said on NBC television on Sunday. “What’s happening is really grotesque and it is contrary to everything President Putin and Russia said they would do.”

Moscow denies any involvement in the disaster and has blamed the Ukrainian military. While stopping short of direct blame on Moscow, Kerry put forward the most detailed U.S. accusations so far, based on the latest U.S. intelligence assessments.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond urged Moscow to ensure international investigators had access to the crash sites. “Russia risks becoming a pariah state if it does not behave properly,” he told Sky television.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he had spoken “overnight” to Putin for the first time about the disaster, amid mounting horror over the treatment of victims’ remains. At least 27 Australian passengers were on the Malaysia Airlines flight.

Abbott said an Australian investigation team was in Kiev but had been unable to travel to the site. He said there had been some improvement with the Ukrainian government offering access.

“But there’s still a hell of a long way to go before anyone could be satisfied with the way that site is being treated,” Abbott said. “It’s more like a garden cleanup than a forensic investigation. This is completely unacceptable.”

After lying for two days in the summer heat, the bodies had been removed from much of the crash site by Sunday, leaving only bloodstained military stretchers along the side of the road.

Emergency workers, who have to navigate reporting both to the authorities in Kiev and the rebels who control the crash site and other areas in the Donetsk region, will now need to pick through the debris spread across the Ukrainian steppe.

As Ukraine accused the rebels of hiding evidence relating to the loss of the airliner, a separatist leader said items thought to be the stricken jet’s “black boxes” were now in rebel hands.

Investigators from the U.N. aviation agency arrived in Ukraine to help probe the crash, but a senior official said safety concerns prevented them from reaching the crash site.

“Until safe passage for them is assured, we don’t send people into that kind of situation,” said the official with the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization.

U.S. CASE

Kerry said the United States had seen supplies moving into Ukraine from Russia in the last month, including a 150-vehicle convoy of armored personnel carriers, tanks and rocket launchers given to the separatists.

It had also intercepted conversations about the transfer to separatists of the Russian radar-guided SA-11 missile system, which it blames for the Boeing 777’s destruction. “It’s pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia,” Kerry said in an interview on CNN.

“There’s enormous amount of evidence, even more evidence that I just documented, that points to the involvement of Russia in providing these systems, training the people on them,” he said on CBS.

Kerry’s evidence of a Russian connection tracked closely with an official unclassified U.S. intelligence summary released over the weekend. It said intelligence analysts confirmed the authenticity of an audiotaped conversation provided to the press by Ukrainian authorities of a known separatist leader boasting of downing the plane.

“We also have information indicating that Russia is providing training to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia” that includes missile systems, it said.

The disaster has sharply deepened the Ukrainian crisis in which the separatists in the Russian-speaking east have been fighting government forces since protesters in Kiev forced out a pro-Moscow president and Russia annexed Crimea in March.

The United States has already imposed sanctions on individuals and businesses close to Putin but Kerry indicated that President Barack Obama might go further. “The president is prepared to take additional steps,” he told Fox News, although he ruled out sending in U.S. troops.

European Union ministers should be ready to announce a fresh round of sanctions at a meeting of the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council this week, said a statement from British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office, issued after telephone calls with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“They … agreed that the EU must reconsider its approach to Russia and that foreign ministers should be ready to impose further sanctions on Russia when they meet on Tuesday,” it said.

The leaders also agreed to press Putin to ensure investigators had free access to the crash site.

IDENTIFICATION SPECIALISTS

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said all efforts were focusing on getting the train loaded with bodies to territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities.

The European security organization, the OSCE, was negotiating with the separatists, he said, adding that a team of victim identification specialists was likely to enter the crash site on Monday.

While Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko issued a renewed appeal for backing from the international community, some European nations, with an eye to their trade links with Russia, have been less enthusiastic about confronting Moscow.

Kerry challenged the Europeans to be more assertive. “It would help enormously if some countries in Europe that have been a little reluctant to move would now recognize this wakeup call and join the United States and President Obama in taking the lead, and also stepping up,” he said.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, Andriy Lysenko, accused the rebels of a cover-up. “The terrorists are doing everything to hide the evidence of the involvement of Russian missiles in the shooting down of that airliner,” he told a news conference in Kiev.

He said the rebels had taken debris and bodies from the crash site in trucks, tampering with a scene that investigators need to be secure to have a chance of determining what and who caused the plane to plunge into the steppe.

MEMORIAL SHRINE

OSCE observers visited part of the crash site for a third day on Sunday. Just before their arrival, emergency workers found parts of three more bodies and put them in black body bags on the side of a road.

At the site where the cockpit fell, in a field of sunflowers near the village of Razsypnoye, residents had made a small memorial shrine of flowers, candles in tiny jars and brightly colored teddy bears.

Photocopied pictures of children and families killed in the disaster, apparently from news coverage of the victims, had been set out on the grass.

All bodies, including that of a woman who had lain naked under a tarp about 50 meters away, had been removed.

“There were five or six over here, and two or three over there,” said a young man with a rifle guarding the site, who declined to give his name. “They took the bodies away to the morgue. Firstly, they were decomposing. And secondly, the smell was horrible.” (Additional reporting by Peter Graff in Hrabove, Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets and Elizabeth Piper in Kiev, Jim Loney, Doina Chiacu, Ayesha Rascoe and Mark Hosenball in Washington, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations, Allison Lampert in Montreal, Lincoln Feast and Jane Wardell in Sydney, William James in London and Nicholas Vinocur in Paris; Writing by Giles Elgood and David Stamp; Editing by Tom Heneghan, Peter Cooney and Eric Walsh)

New York State’s Public Service Commission (PSC) is currently reviewing Comcast’s plan to purchase Time Warner Cable for over $45 billion, a merger which would link the nation’s two largest cable companies. This merger has the potential to affect millions of New Yorkers who rely on Time Warner Cable for TV, phone, and internet access at home and at their place of business. As a result, it is critical that state and federal regulators review the proposal to determine whether it is truly in the best interests of consumers.

Today, I submitted testimony to the PSC, urging it to do just that. For Comcast, this is an opportunity to do the right thing by introducing itself to the New York market as a company that values equitable access and understands that its product–the fourth utility of the modern age–must be available to all New Yorkers. If Comcast fails to provide a detailed, practical plan to both address the ongoing digital divide in New York City and ensure its long-term commitment to net neutrality, the PSC should reject the merger.

As Gotham’s residents know all too well, our city is stuck in an internet stone age. According to a study by the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, New Yorkers not only endure slower internet service than similar cities in other parts of the world, but we also pay higher prices for that substandard service.

Today, nearly 3 million New York City residents lack internet access at home and many entrepreneurs who hoped to launch businesses in former industrial districts within the five boroughs have had to abandon (PDF) those plans after discovering high-speed internet connections were not available.

While there is a significant digital divide in New York on socioeconomic lines, the truth is that no neighborhood is immune from poor internet. As a report (PDF) I issued last year found, from Tribeca to Tompkinsville, the Upper East Side to East Flatbush, the South Bronx to Sheepshead Bay, communities across the city and throughout the state are affected by poor broadband.

To date, Comcast’s effort to close the digital divide have focused on its “Internet Essentials” program, which provides internet access to low-income Americans for $10 a month. However, the program’s limited eligibility has kept connectivity beyond the reach of millions of Americans. For instance, the program is not offered to childless couples or low-income individuals.

A recent analysis of customers in Time Warner Cable’s service area found that of the 4.6 million households that earn less than the amount that would qualify them for the federal government’s free and reduced-price lunch program, only 1.7 million would qualify for Internet Essentials.

The PSC should press Comcast to significantly expand the reach of Internet Essentials and to provide a concrete outreach plan to communities that have low rates of internet use.

Comcast not only has a duty to work to close the digital divide, but also must ensure that the internet remains a place where all people can engage in robust discussion on an equal footing and where the power of ideas, rather than the size of one’s pocketbook, guides the marketplace. That’s why the PSC must carefully examine Comcast’s commitment to net neutrality.

In recent months, Comcast has squeezed additional payment out of content providers, such as Netflix, in exchange for preferential access to its network.

This type of arrangement is concerning, because if fiber-optic networks are up for sale to the highest bidder, it both threatens to undermine the entrepreneurial energy of the internet and could also lead to higher prices for consumers to access content. Simply put: a merger without a commitment to the principles of net neutrality is not in the public interest.

Under a new law signed by Governor Cuomo in April, cable companies must affirmatively demonstrate that mergers are in the public interest in order to secure approval.

As a result, the PSC has a duty to hold Comcast’s feet to the fire and ensure that its proposed merger with Time Warner will not only protect consumers, but will contribute to an internet infrastructure that can support a 21st century economy in all five boroughs.

Could Microsoft be working on an augmented reality pair of smart glasses? Well based an earlier Microsoft patent, it would seem to suggest that is the case, although a newly published patent from Microsoft which was filed for back in January 2014 seems to suggest that Microsoft’s augmented reality efforts could be getting serious.

The patent application is for a “Wearable behavior-based vision system” which according to the description, not only will it be able to recognize real world objects, but it will also be able to predict its behavior. This is actually interesting because we’ve seen Microsoft’s predictive efforts with Cortana which has been pretty successful, so we have to wonder if Microsoft will be able to apply that to augmented reality.

Given the fact that it is a pair of augmented reality glasses, it means that users will be able look around them and observe real world objects, so unlike devices that completely immerse the gamer in the gaming world, like the Oculus Rift of Project Morpheus, users of Microsoft’s glasses will be able to enjoy their games without knocking over items at home.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard Microsoft express interest in wearables. Recently the company revealed their plans for a wearable device designed for the blind/visually impaired which in a way sounds like the current patent, w

Microsoft Patent Reveals Additional Plans For Augmented Reality

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As we inch closer towards the iPhone 6’s eventual release, we have been treated with additional photos of the upcoming device. A recent video surfaced claiming that the iPhone 6’s display will not be made from pure sapphire, and now thanks to a new photo, images of the alleged iPhone 6’s Lightning connector, microphone, and headphone jack have surfaced, courtesy of MacX.

According to the person who posted the photo, they claim to have gotten the component from an old high school classmate who is working in the manufacturing industry in Shenzhen, China. Given that Foxconn has a factory in that area, it just might explain how they got their hands on it, although there’s no way of actually verifying their claims.

That being said, the design of the component appears to be similar to previous iPhones, with the main differences being the extra grounding plates, circuitry, and a cut out above the Lightning connector which is believed to be used as a space saving measure. Interestingly enough it has also been noted that the headphone jack is larger than previous iPhones.

Some have speculated it could be used as a speaker enclosure, but given the tight nature, we doubt that one can expect good quality sound from it, so we guess we’ll just have to wait for Apple’s official announcement to see if they have anything to say about it. Of course all of this hinges on the component being the real thing, so take it with a grain of salt for now, but do check back with us at a later date for the details.

Alleged iPhone 6 Lightning Connector Component Leaked

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Can you remember what life was like before smartphones? Did we do anything different compared to today? Well obviously there are differences compared from then till now, but did you also know that apparently our eating time has increased thanks to smartphones? One restaurant decided to find out when they received negative reviews on Yelp about how long it took for customers to get a table.

Using a high-speed surveillance system, the company compared footage from 2004 to that of 2014. They found that prior to smartphones, customers would come to the restaurant, spend about 8 minutes browsing the menu before placing their order. The total amount of time for the food to arrive and for them to get the check was around 1 hour and 5 minutes.

However in 2014, it seems that customers who are seated “waste” more time taking photos of the restaurant, and when the waiters were called over, it was more to inquire about the WiFi password as opposed to actually ordering. The average time for the modern diner to order, receive their food, eat it, and pay, was found to have averaged out at 1 hour 55 minutes.

It’s actually an interesting observation and while we know that smartphones has led to us being less social with the people we’re actually hanging out with, who would have thought that it would actually lead to us taking longer to complete our meals! What do you guys think? Do you agree with the observation?

Smartphones Contribute To Meals Taking Longer To Complete

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